“JONATHAN’S GREAT KNIFE”: DRACULA MEETS JACK THE RIPPER

Extract

THE POPULAR LEGEND used to be that at supper in 1895, Bram Stoker had “a too generous helping of dressed crab,” and that the crab begot the subsequent nightmare which in turn begot Dracula (Ludlam 99). This theory was nullified, however, by the discovery in the 1970s of Stoker’s working notes in the Rosenbach Foundation library of Philadelphia.¹ Stoker, it seems, made his initial memorandum for the novel on March 8, 1890 while on holiday in Whitby, where Dracula was eventually to disembark in canine semblance. By February 1892, he had sketched out a plot, complementing a nod to the new technology — Kodak cameras, portable typewriters and recording phonographs — by situating events in the next calendar year, that of 1893. The retrospect over an interval of seven years in Jonathan Harker’s “Note” comprising the final pages of the novel would thus imply a date of composition of 1900; they were actually written, however, by Stoker, in July 1896, and one may wonder whether his official chronology was at this point to the forefront of Stoker’s consciousness. Arguably, July 1889 would have been precisely among the candidates to have been a portentous date, epitomizing an epoch when “we all went through the flames,” so far as the inspiration of Dracula is concerned (378; ch. 27).²